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Comment by xinsight | Hacker News Reader

I only see redirects to an itunes search.

  curl -I http://appstore.com/startrekapp
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Server: somethingNice.
  Date: Tue Jun  1 12:48:03 PDT 1999 PDT
  Referer: http://appstore.com/
  Location:   http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?mt=8&path=apps%2fstartrekapp
  Content-type: text/html
  Content-length: 470

If you don't launch iTunes, it results in a bland/useless page in the browser. Lot more work to do before this could be considered a "vanity URL".

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Update: If you add "www" to the URL, you get a 404.

I'm having a hard time believing that this is run by Apple. The appear to be the registrar in the domain records - and the technical note clearly indicates they control appstore.com

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1633/_index.ht...

But it seems off-brand for the following reasons:

* requests to the main domain uses an HTML redirect instead of an HTTP redirect (as if they didn't have permissions to configure the webserver properly)

* the webserver name is hidden on normal requests (see above), but visible on 404 requests. The servers are "Apache/2.2.3 (PU_IAS)" and "Apache/2.2.15 (Oracle)"

* the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

Odd.

I wouldn't overestimate Apple when it comes to web technologies.

Everything they run — from iTunes Connect, developer.apple.com, to the App Store on iOS and Mac OS X, feels damn slow.

> the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

That's ridiculously unprofessional. Every other domain Apple owns redirects to apple.com/ if you go somewhere you shouldn't.

Seems 100% perfect to me. If I want a link to open my apps in iTunes, I can give them this one, and it was created automatically: http://appstore.com/titanbaseproductions

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